Leah Cooper

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The Maryland Morning  with Sheilah Kast

The Everyday on Display

Leah Cooper is an artist whose work blends found object, sculpture, and drawing. She has just finished a graduate degree at The Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work, along with that of ten of her colleagues in MICA’s Studio Art program, is part of a thesis exhibition that opens June 29 in MICA’s Fox Building.

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MICA 2009, MFA in Studio Art Thesis Exhibition

Excerpt from essay by writer and curator Sarah Tanguy

In this year’s graduating class, slowing down and taking note of the everyday, both as a means of artistic understanding and of viewer discovery, emerged as a central theme. Given the current sensory and intellectual overload, for this to be an aesthetic concern is critical and even radical. Otherwise, twenty seconds is the average time spent on viewing a work of art. While the eleven artists deploy different strategies, they share a broad interest in topography as a subject, be it of nature, the city, light, music, or the mind.

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Playing the familiar off the strange, Leah Cooper turned a busy, twelve by six-foot corridor into a complex, three-dimensional drawing in a week. After an initial survey, she engaged in a call and response between the site and small objects she had constructed from found detritus, establishing relationships with the walls, ceiling, fixtures, shadows and cracks. The resulting Iterating the Ordinary featured a series of improvised actions, including a wall-mounted twig whose presence was magnified through dramatic lighting and monofilament extensions. In an existential flash, it became clear that no single outcome was forthcoming: the drawings not realized were as powerful as those awaiting attention. Cooper’s investigations into the minutia of the material world would only generate further entries for her object-specific “comprehensive reservoir of visual information.”

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